ENDING THE MYTH OF HARD WORK
If the average South African workday is nine hours, it means the average South African works 45 hours in a week, 180 hours in a month, and 2 160 hours in a year. With minimum wage in 2019 set at R20 per hour, this means that the average South African can expect to earn R43 200 per year – if they are at least paid the minimum wage.
Though there is no maximum wage prescription, there is the other end of the scale – company executives who earn high salaries. During 2018, most of the CEOs of the JSE top 40 companies reportedly took home more than R20 million. If the average CEO also works a nine-hour day, this means that in a month they earn about R1.5 million, in a week they earn around R375 000. This means that in an hour they earn just over R8 000.
And so we may likely have one company in which worker A earns R20 per hour and worker B per earns R8 000 per hour. How can 60 minutes have such different outcomes?
BALANCING THE SCALES
‘Hard work’ is the common explanation for how CEOs obtain their positions and commensurate packages. They put in the blood, sweat and tears to earn their leadership titles and deserved salaries. But if we all measure time in the same way, how many more litres of blood, drops of sweat and buckets of tears must be shed to earn a CEO-level income?
It’s a sad reality that ‘hard work’ is not the sole reason why an hour can have such divergent values. Other factors amplify the value of that hour. They increase the likelihood of an individual being either worker A or worker B.
Privilege is one of those factors. For your average South African employee, no amount of hard work will get them earning even half of what a JSE CEO earns.
We love stories of people who move from one end of the earning spectrum to the other; relishing rags to riches narratives as a testament to the power of hard work and self-belief. But we forget that they are very rare exceptions. And that they very rarely have a replicable model.
This trajectory of a change in earning and social status is referred to as social mobility. It’s the dream of many, but the lived experience of few.
On the move
Sociologists refer to different types of social mobility:
•Horizontal: This is a change of occupation that doesn’t affect social hierarchy. For example, an individual moving from a teaching position in the Western Cape to one in Gauteng.
•Vertical: This is often sparked by a change in occupation that’s a promotion or upgrade of status. For example, when a teacher becomes a principal. Vertical mobility can be upward or downward.
•Intergenerational: Prominence cannot be built in a day; sometimes it takes decades. A change in stature that most benefits offspring is referred to as intergenerational mobility. It’s the daughter of a domestic worker and miner who goes on to become a teacher. When her child, who was born into a plusher life than mom, becomes a highly paid lawyer, it’s another lift of intergenerational mobility.
•Intragenerational: This refers to an individual’s change in lifestyle. It’s when the teacher who might have grown up in a backroom, is able to build a new four-room family home.
Nigerian author and professor Chinua Achebe has an astute proverb that ‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’.
It’s true also of privilege; until the lesser privileged have their own historians, the history of achievement will always glorify the privileged.
From their perches of success, the privileged often credit their own hard work for achieving social mobility. They share stories of coming from nothing and rising to great somethings through toil and labour. In the transaction of life, they put in hard work and out came success.
It seems aspirational, but this myth of hard work can be damaging; and is untrue.
RARE AND NOT EASY TO REPLAY
In most cases it’s a fallacy because of what psychologists refer to as self-serving bias. This is a tendency for people to attribute positive events to their own character, and negative events to external factors.
It makes success even sweeter to have it be the outcome of individual effort. But in this quest to attribute success to self, external factors are not given the recognition or credit they’re due.
Self-serving bias in the context of career achievements and associated income is damaging because it distorts accomplishments and sets the foundation for prejudice against those who do not achieve.
This logic subscribes to a belief that if poor people worked harder, they’d be able to work themselves out of poverty. Therefore their inability to get out of poverty is because they’re lazy or inept or disinterested.
For poor people, external factors are not factored strongly in the assessment of their lives. Instead, privileged society tells them that their material poverty is due to the poverty of their ambition, famine in their work ethic and the scarcity of their self-belief.
London-based barrister Hashi Mohamed arrived in Europe as an unaccompanied child refugee. He was nine years old; his father had died and his mother had stayed behind in their native Kenya. Twenty years later, Mohamed now has a lauded legal career and a side-gig as a broadcaster. He presents a BBC Radio 4 documentary called Social Mobility.
Mohamed’s story is incredible and inspiring. But it’s rare and, in an opinion piece for The Guardian UK, he cautions, not easily replicable.
Is my route possible for anyone in the next generation with whom I share a similar background? I believe not. And this is not because they are any less able or less dedicated to succeed. What I have learned in this short period of time is that the pervasive narrative of ‘if you work hard you will get on’ is a complete myth. It’s not true and we need to stop saying it. This is because ‘working hard, and doing the right thing’ barely gets you to the starting line.
Stories of ‘Poor to Prosperous’, are often truncated and repackaged. They become tokens of what’s possible; and are dangled as carrots to motivate other poor people to similar heights.
Achievement is inspiring, but there is much more behind it than just hard work. Looking at South Africa’s history leads to many questions about the role of hard work and its contributions to success.
HISTORY’S FIRSTS
Born in 1944 in the Eastern Cape, Wiseman Nkuhlu was the first black man in South Africa to become a chartered accountant. He registered for a BCom degree at the University of Fort Hare in 1967. In 1976, he qualified as the first black CA in the country. There is no doubt that Nkuhlu worked hard towards this accomplishment. He did have to spend hours in front of his books; he did have to show up and be an active participant at lectures; he did have to complete his articles.
Crediting his eventual success solely to hard work and self-belief would however not add up. Assessing his career story against the context of apartheid South Africa shows that it took conducive external factors to facilitate his education.
It is implausible that up until 1976, there had not been a single black South African who was willing to work hard enough to become a CA.
It is implausible that many others prior to Nkuhlu hoped to pursue this career path but fell short because they weren’t willing to put in the long arduous hours.
It is implausible that in the decades and even centuries preceding 1976 no other black men or women worked hard enough on their accounting at school to have good enough marks to qualify for BCom studies.
A story that likely inspires little girls all over the world is that of Asnath Mahapa, South Africa’s first black female pilot. Mahapa made history in 1998 with her first flight, and then again in 2018 when she was part of South African Airways’ first all-female flight crew which embarked on an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to São Paulo in Brazil.
She was joined on this landmark trip by Captain Jane Trembath, the first female airline captain in South Africa to command overseas flights. Now a seasoned commercial pilot, Mahapa shared in an interview with CNN that her road to the skies was not an easy one.
‘I was the only woman in my class the whole time,’ she said. ‘I had to work very hard. I had to probably work ten times harder than the men that I was with in the classroom.’
There is no doubt that it takes hard work to become a pilot; but hard work isn’t the only requirement.
In addition to this, Mahapa would have needed to have adequate funds for the various ground, technical and flight training required before qualifying as a pilot. A notoriously expensive sector, aviation has high barriers to entry that Mahapa would have needed to hurdle over.
Her intelligence and work ethic would have remained grounded if she hadn’t found the money to give her dreams wings.
For Mahapa, Nkuhlu and countless other ‘firsts’, hard work has been an essential contribution towards their success. But other factors such as luck, network, access and opportunity have also been notable inputs.
RESERVED ASCENT
In 2018, the World Bank released a report titled Overcoming Poverty in South Africa: An assessment of drivers, constraints and opportunities. It had revelations that confirmed on paper what many South Africans experience in reality: that you can work very hard and still be poor.
In this report, the World Bank uses six factors as correlates of mobility: education, labour markets, race, family structure, migration, and location. These are the factors that can influence income changes and foster social mobility.
They are also likely the factors that have fostered the privilege some South Africans get to enjoy today. ‘Education, labour markets, spatial segregation, and migration strongly affect chances of upward mobility,’ the authors write.
Skill and education matter for intergenerational mobility. Higher-skill occupations are likely to give rise to greater mobility, as does a higher level of education. Similarly, neighbourhood and labour effects are important in upward mobility.
Too many times, hard work has been given undue credit – undue in that the other important factors for success are sidelined in favour of grit. This creates a false promise for those pursuing success; and a false comfort to those enjoying it. When external factors are not adequately acknowledged, the story is not true, and nor is it complete.
These factors include labour markets, but also family events and policies:
This study reveals that labour market incomes are the largest contributor to inequality in South Africa … It shows that access to higher levels of education and stable labour market income are key determinants for households to achieve economic stability in South Africa.
In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), southern African economist for the World Bank Victor Sulla explained however that while many may have hopes for a better life, ‘opportunity inequality’ makes it difficult to get out of poverty. This is because people have varying levels of access to opportunities like tertiary studies and the people who’ve traditionally had wealth and economic opportunity continue to stockpile and enjoy these benefits.
Paul Noumba Um, Country Director for South Africa at the World Bank, clarifies some of the biggest components that has emerged in their research for the 2018 study.
A higher level of education of the household head and access to stable labour market income are key determinants for households to achieving economic stability. This implies that access to quality higher and tertiary education, better labour market access, and improvement of both the quantity and quality of employment opportunities would be important to spurring the growth of the middle class.
When there has been positive social mobility, self-serving bias credits this improvement to individual effort, such as working hard or being a nice person, and neglects to acknowledge the favourable external conditions.
However, when the privileged don’t experience social mobility, self-serving bias attributes the stagnation or regression to outside factors such as the economy or BEE. Self-serving bias believes that positive career advances are because of me, and negative career situations are because of others.
WORKING AND DIGGING
Other influences that can have a positive effect on career development are family events, governmental policies and personal health.
These factors are all thrown into the proverbial backpack which the privileged carry and from which they draw.
Some backpacks are fuller than others; others are close to empty. Some people navigate life with no backpack while full backpacks stay locked up in safes or trust funds for future generations.
In the Race of Life, success is easier for some because they can simply reach out and dig in their backpack for the contact number of a tutor to help simplify complex algebra or a family friend who can help secure an internship.
They can dig in the backpack for the car keys that will help them get to an interview on time and unflustered, or for the money to pay for a flat in an area close to work.
They can dig in the backpack for tuition fees to study to Masters level; or for finances to get overseas work experience. These backpacks play a critical role.
In many circumstances, their contents, such as network, resources and finances, are the bedrock of privilege.
Acknowledging that they are often given to us unconditionally sets a context to understanding privilege. Our assigned at birth individual backpacks have nothing to do with anything we’ve done; nothing to do with decisions we’ve made; nothing to do with our abilities. And nothing to do with hard work.
We may retain them through hard work; but from birth and at other important junctures when we dig into them, it’s not our hard work that has determined the contents of the backpack. And therefore it’s not our hard work that is the sole contributor to our successes.